Savouring Sustainability with Edible Takeaway Cups
Savouring Sustainability with Edible Takeaway Cups
Sometimes I stumble on a great product, and I think to myself, why aren’t more people talking about this? That’s exactly what I thought when I first heard of Good-Edi, my new favourite waste free coffee cup concept that, for some reason, is yet to take over every single café in Australia.
So, what’s it all about? I’ve been following the Good-Edi story for a while now and it is pure genius. Let me paint a picture for you, you head to your favourite café, and you realise you’ve forgotten your reusable cup, damn. You don’t have time to sit down and dine in, but you walk in anyway and pray to the Italian coffee gods for a miracle. Sitting atop the La Marzocco coffee machine in all their glory is as stack of Good-Edi cups. The zero-waste edible coffee cup of your dreams. The gods have spoken, you’ll never go without caffeine again and it will forever come with a bonus snack! It’s a coffee lovers dream.
The brains behind Good-Edi, Catherine and Aniyo have 20 years of experience in food processing and, like a lot of us, want to help make this world a better place. As one of the most significant challenges facing the country today, 2.7 million single use takeaway coffee cups find their way into landfill each day in Australia. Just make sure you read that correctly, that stat is...EACH DAY!
While there are ‘eco-friendly’ cup options out there, they are just shifting the problem elsewhere. Most of these cups require special commercial facilities and specific environments to break down over time, and fun fact, the public rubbish bin on the street out the front of your fave café is not the right environment. The reality is, they will end up in landfill. Bugger.
Enter Good-Edi, manufactured in Australia (YAY Jobs!) and made with locally and ethically sourced ingredients such as oats, flour, water, bran, sugar, and salt. They’re vegan but not yet gluten free, that’s a work in progress. Your coffee cup will stay crisp for 40 minutes and won’t leak for up to 8 hours. The best part is, if you don’t feel like a healthy treat after your caffeine hit you’ve got a handful of disposable options, pop it in the bin and it will break down naturally in 2-6 weeks, put it in your home compost or your garden, or if you are in your eco-warrior era you can use it as a pot to plant seeds in. The options are endless.
Earlier this year I was in Melbourne visiting one of my favourite zero-waste cafés who, you guessed it, serve coffee in Good-Edi cups. Finally, I had the opportunity to experience an edible cup IRL. I was expecting a sweet biscuit type of flavour, not Teddy Bear biscuit sweet, but more like an Arrowroot biscuit vibe. I completely missed the mark, it’s more of a waffle cone consistency without the sweetness, which is great because it doesn’t impact the flavour of your coffee or whatever your morning cup of joy is.
The bonus is knowing that you are diverting waste from landfill one delicious hot drink at a time. Can you imagine the impact we could have if café’s all-around Australia, ditched the single use and adopted the Good-Edi. I’m imagining the planet thanking us by miraculously growing greenery out of the walls, creating a glorious utopia for us to live in.
Ok, so that will never happen, but I’ve got good news for you. This weekend (Sat 22nd – Sun 23rd July) BLAEK Store is giving you the chance to not only try Good -Edi for yourself but also get a free coffee (or hot drink of choice). This Plastic Free July we have teamed up with Good-Edi, Allpress Espresso and our neighbours, Ruby Lane Café. What’s the catch? All you have to do is drop off your hard to recycle waste (dental hygiene, shaving products, stationary) for recycling, grab yourself a Good-Edi cup and head next door to Ruby Lane for your free drink. There are only 50 free cup / drink offers available, so you have to be quick!
Not in Sydney but keen to jump on the waste free coffee train? Head on down to our friends at INTO Coffee in Collingwood, Melbourne and experience Good-Edi every day of the week. You can read all about INTO Coffee HERE and the amazing things they are doing in the zero-waste café space.
If, like me, you want to see more café’s adopting Good-Edi, then spread the word! There is nothing better than word of mouth, take this info to your local café and let’s make that utopian dream into a reality.